Microsoft first demonstrated Houston at its Professional Developers Conference in late 2009. At its Mix conference this past spring, company officials shared more about Houston, noting it is a browser-based Silverlight control that will allow developers to interact directly with SQL Azure, Microsoft's cloud database.

Here's how Microsoft officials are describing Houston, via a July 21 post to the SQL Azure Team Blog: "Project 'Houston' provides a web-based database management tool for basic database management tasks like authoring and executing queries, designing and editing a database schema, and editing table data."

There is no estimated ship date for the final version of Houston mentioned in the post. I'll update if I can get one.

Last week at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner conference, Microsoft announced that "Dallas," another cloud-related tool/service coming from Redmond, is going to be available in the fourth quarter of 2010. A third CTP of Dallas is due by mid-August.

Dallas is a service for discovering, purchasing and buying "premium data subscriptions" (both public and private data) that can be used by those developing and running applications on Windows Azure. Dallas includes a common marketplace and a provisioning/billing framework.

Content providers which already have committed to providing “Dallas” data include NASA, National Geographic, Associated Press, Zillow.com, and Weather Central.